AIMS Newsletter no.76, September 2018

THE RDA IGAD CAPACITY DEVELOPMENT FOR AGRICULTURE DATA WG IN ACTION!

BACKGROUND

Even though there is a recognised need for capacity development in the fields of agricultural (open) data management, and a number of different organisations are attempting to address this, there does not seem to be a coordinated approach covering all agricultural domains which can adequately identify training gaps and make recommendations.

A FORWARD LOOKING AGENDA WITH ACTION-ORIENTED GOALS

Since there is an urgent need to develop synergies between existing education and training activities related to agricultural science, as well as increase the coherence on the delivery of training, the Capacity Development for Agriculture Data WG will perform a broad landscape assessment to identify existing gaps and training requirements within:

By acting as a hub for coordinating the development and provision of training to potential stakeholders (agriculture experts, content and technology solution providers, researchers, policy makers), the Capacity Development for Agriculture Data WG will present various use cases and linkages to different sectors of development, as well as cite resources for a more in-depth examination of strategic actionable insights related to capacity development issues. In identifying and evaluating existing resources, the group will also address the language barrier.

Additionally, in light of the above mentioned collaboration, the Capacity Development for Agriculture Data WG will develop ideas for Joint training programmes (both online and hands-on) in Agricultural data.

Capacity building resources – including:

1.) a Report on the current capacity development needs,2.) the main Recommendation on the identified good practices and3.) Guidance on advocacy to support its adoption

– produced by the group, will be hosted on the RDA website and shared publicly, in order to:

provide the right role capacity distribution to all interested parties within the agriculture and nutrition ecosystem, in order to support the achievement of the SDGs through the effective andresponsiblemanaging of today’s large scale data assets and networks.

Lastly, the sharing of knowledge about training initiatives and technologies will reduce digital gaps and will therefore benefit researchers and domain experts in developing countries.

KEY IMPACTS

Reduce effort and duplication in development of curricula on support of capacity development for individuals, communities and initiatives that will benefit from the use of Agricultural data outputs;

Advocate collaborative efforts in agriculture and nutrition open data initiatives through knowledge sharing among capacity development activities;

Advocate programmes, good practices and lessons learned, which will enable the effective re-use of open data;

Develop the capacity of the different open data users for a more effective understanding and improved accessto open data;

Expand the common impact of open agricultural research by joining synergies in training programmes using the guidelines developed by key (agriculture) data management capacity building communities: GODAN, IGAD, CODATA.

CONTRIBUTE WITH IDEAS AND STAY IN THE LOOP!

The Capacity Development for Agriculture Data WG will carry out all discussions through the IGAD mailing list <rda-agrdatainterop-ig@rda-groups.org> to ensure openness and include everyone in the capacity development training activities. This will ensure that all points are discussed in an open and participatory way.

International Data Week (IDW 2018) will be hosted (on 5-8 November 2018, Gaborone, Botswana) by the Botswana Open Science and Open Data Forum, and co-organized by the ICSU Committee on Data for Science and Technology (CODATA), the ICSU World Data System (WDS) and the Research Data Alliance (RDA). IDW 2018 will bring together data professionals and researchers from all disciplines and from all parts of the globe.